From the Our Father:
Give us this day our daily bread ...
The daily bread that we ask God to give to us is simply Himself. It is all that He is. God alone can sustain our souls, the way food sustains our bodies.
Asking Him to give daily bread to us implies a certain disposition on our part. When we ask someone to speak, we listen. When we ask someone to come out where we can see them, our eyes are open. When we ask someone for a high five, our hand is raised and ready.
When we ask God to give us our daily bread, we imply that we are ready to receive it. All of it. All of Him. We can hardly ask God to give us all of Himself and then run from Him..
To ask someone to feed us is also to admit a kind of helplessness. Like a baby who has to be spoon-fed. We cannot obtain for ourselves the fulfillment that conquers our hunger and comes from God HImself. We must rely completely on Him to grace us with the gift of Himself. We have to quiet and still ourselves in order for God to give us what we need -- and nowhere more completely and literally than when we receive the body, blood, soul and divinity of Christ in the Eucharist.
Nowhere on earth is the gift of God's very self so completely and literally given to us than in that sacrament. The bread and wine mysteriously and actually become the body and blood of Jesus Christ.
And it illustrates what God must do in order to give himself to us -- which is to make Himself, by comparison to His original form, unfathomably small. C.S. Lewis uses the image of a man turning himself into a slug, and living among slugs. But, he observes, the distance between a slug and a man is infinitely less than the difference between man and God.
Yet God became man. It is how God relates to man, and fills man up and sustains him. He makes Himself small. And then He makes Himself yet smaller, taking on the form of bread and wine so that he can really truly enter into our bodies, and thereby communicate His grace in the most intimate way possible.
Humans pay a lot more attention to what we eat than to what we touch, or look at or listen to. We obsess in a particular way over over our diets. There are many filthy things out there that we might touch that we would never eat. Why? Because we can't just wash off what we eat.
I can look at a hamburger on the table in front of me and know what it is. I could have a Ph.D in hamburger and be able to write a dissertation on what would happen if I ate it -- where all the different ingredients would go, etc. But no level of detailed knowledge about the hamburger and what would happen in my body once I ate it would actually sustain my body. I have to take it into myself. When we eat something it becomes a part of who we are. Only then does the meal truly energize us.
It is not enough merely to know who Christ is. It is not even enough to know a lot of details about Him. He wants to enter into us and change us from the inside out.
What we eat is both more crucial and more potentially hazardous to our health than anything else we come into contact with. If something is bad for us to eat, and we eat it, we may die sooner than we wish. If something is necessary and crucial for us to eat, and we don't, we may die of malnutrition or starvation. Nothing is more necessary and crucial than Christ Himself.
It is not enough simply to know God. If we are to be holy as He is holy, we must literally feed off of Him.
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